Having a lightbulb moment is one of the best feelings in the world, here you are, mulling about your business when an epiphany hits you out of nowhere and catapults you into deep thought or action. Unfortunately, for many of us, lightbulb moments are far and few between and we find ourselves more often facing moments of "WTF," where we realize we have unfortunately made a mistake that will haunt us for days, weeks, and sometimes years to come.
The comfort here, of course, is the fact that none of us are alone in our moments of massive face-palming. Everyone has a gaffe here or there, and in many cases the best way to shake it off is by roasting yourself.
To this very point, commentes in a recent Reddit thread shared some of their most memorable "I've f*cked up" moments, and it'll make you feel infinitely less alone.
1. dontbadgerthewitness accidentally sent their friend to the wrong BBQ.
"Not my fuck up necessarily...but I invited a friend over for a BBQ. He didn’t know anyone and has never been to my house but seemed really eager to go.
So I was a little irritated that he was almost 2 hours late. I was just about to text him when I happened to look over my neighbors fence."
"The neighbor was also having a BBQ. It was like it happened in slow motion. I saw my friend in the neighbors yard chatting up some old lady. Our eyes locked. I saw the realization literally hit his face. I still laugh about it. I swear the guy turned white!"
2. rricenator got in trouble in slow motion.
"The first time I, age 8, dropped the F bomb in front of mom. It was exactly like that scene in Christmas Story. Time slowed as I heard the word exiting my mouth, yet was powerless to stop it. At least no soap for me, though."
3. FuryWhatWhen unleashed a stream of literal shit.
"Direction driller and locator of 10 years here. Drilling in Miami quite a few years ago and was doing a.faily deep road crossing. Half a rod under the road I felt a pop and proceeded to see a 30' tall shit stream shoot out of the road. I had just drilled into a 12" unmarked forcemain sewer. If you have ever seen a 30' stream of raw sewage you will never forget the smell."
4. P_Rigger destroyed their government ID.
"I pulled, what I thought was my expired credit card out of my pocket and ran it through the shredder at work. It wasn’t my credit card. It was my government ID card, which I also need to log onto my work computer."
5. lovelydaysahead underestimated their final.
"While i was doing my human bio test, i realized after handing the paper in that i needed to do two essays instead of one... quickest 5 stages of grief i went through."
6. rfd2115 sent a NSFW group text.
"Sexted a group text instead of my person..."
7. Radiant_Questgiver could have blown up the house.
"A while back I was doing laundry and noticed our washer had a bit of funky smell to it, I looked up some home remedy online that involved baking soda and vinegar and while I was standing at the washer I thought " a cup of bleach wouldn't hurt."
"As soon as I threw it in and started the washer my brain went " HEY! YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T JUST BE MIXING CHEMICALS ALL WILLY NILLY!" So I pulled out my phone and googled vinegar + bleach and just about shat my pants when I read the result."
"Vinegar + bleach = Toxic Chlorine Gas. I proceeded to panic and scream for everyone to get the hell out of the house. Be careful with chemicals people."
8. voice_of_craisin completely missed the boat.
"It's been almost 30 years since this happened and I still have nightmares. Freshman year of college. My first set of college finals. I was totally prepared and ready to take them all. Had almost straight As going into finals. I go to my last one, which was a throwaway 3 credits of introduction to sociology. I sit down ready to ace it and look up at the board to see "Biology 103". Huh, that's weird. I pull out my calendar. The sociology final was yesterday."
9. lantmannenyo risked it all for their reputation.
"When I climbed my schools roof. Was quite a heavy kid, and I was out and about with my cousin and mates. After running around school my friends dare me to go up on the roof and, as I’m not a wuss, I gotta prove to them that I ain’t afraid to go on no roof!"
"So after a while and much help I got up. Ran around up there and had a bit of fun and then I had to get down.... that’s when I knew I fucked up."
"Nothing in sight to help me, all I could do was either call someone to help me ( e,g parents or firemen) or jump. Decided to take the risk and jump, tried to do parkour like I saw in videos, jump and roll you know. Ended with fucking up my foot, calling my parents and driving to the hospital, when questioned said I slipped while playing basketball.
Foot is still fucked up til this day and my mom think it was because of basketball, lol."
10. billbapapa BBQed with TOO much ease.
"The other day I was BBQing, not paying attention. Had a glove on my right hand that's oven safe. Someone handed me a beer and proceeded to talk to me. I took the beer with my right hand."
"I then opened the BBQ and grabbed the top grill with my left (unprotected) hand to adjust it, pulled it half way out before the heat registered. Once it did the realization was pretty instant. The blisters were bad for over a week."
11. james_bond0215 forgot a crucial pizza preparation step.
"Not that exciting but it was my first day at me new pizza job and 20 minutes after I cashed out a pickup order I FROZE and realized: I never sliced that pizza."
12. unevolved_panda forgot the eggs, until they made themselves known.
"Just this morning I heard a weird pop in the kitchen. Had a moment of total confusion, and then remembered that I had started hardboiling some eggs more than 45 mins ago. The pop was a hard-boiled egg exploding."
13. 830_L had a wake up call with their own teeth.
"I had a moment during a dental cleaning about 15 years ago when the hygienist was flossing between my teeth and above the taste of blood from my bleeding gums, there was this overwhelming rotten food/sewage taste from all the crap that got trapped between my teeth and rotted, and was then being pulled out by the floss. That was after she'd spent 30 minutes scraping calculus off my teeth. I was always good about brushing but didn't do anything else back then, and I wore retainers at night, which make your mouth completely nasty. That was the moment when I realized just how awful my dental hygiene was and it disgusted me."
"After that appointment I slowly became obsessed with dental hygiene. At my last cleaning, the dentist told me, "It's obvious that you take very good care of your teeth. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it, because it's working." Thankfully I started doing that at a fairly young age. I do have some fillings leftover from that time and a few teeth that had to have crowns because the fillings started breaking down, but I haven't had a new cavity in a very long time."
"Edit: I have a routine that takes about 10 minutes. I use a waterpik, then floss, brush, and rinse with Crest pro health mouthwash. The waterpik is what made a really big difference with my gums. It flushes food particles from between your teeth and around the sides of your mouth, and stimulates your gums, which is part of what keeps them from bleeding."
14. Longgadogg has ruined their own sleep schedule, many times.
"Going home at 4am even though I have a 7am class, oh and the lights at the living room is on. Walk in seeing my mom sitting at the sofa like a goddamn mafia."
15. PhD_Sucks_Ass could have lost it all.
"As a kid I let the handbrake off in my parents car, I'd watched my brother do it plenty of times before so why couldn't I?
It rolled straight down a steep bank with me in the driver's seat and into a tractor tyre, my parents were fuming for a few weeks. Really it's a miracle I've survived this long!"
16. mejok stood up for his GF and almost faced the sweet release of death.
"Was at a bar, chatting with some friends. My GF was across the room sitting with some other friends. Some drunk dude showed up and started groping her. I jumped up, pushed him away and yelled "fuck off." Then he turned around and I realized he was like twice my size....and not in the fat way....in the tall muscular way. I mean I did the right thing, but if the bartender hadn't leapt over the bar and jumped in between us immediately that guy would have wiped the fucking floor with me. The moment the dude turned around I thought "fuck, this is gonna hurt."
17. jagermeister7 really did themselves in.
"Here is good one which happened last week. I had a little too much beer and passed out at around 2AM. It was couple of hours after I woke up and had this feeling to take a shit but at the same time I felt like throwing up. As I run towards washroom I thought definitely I'm gonna throw up but nothing came out. I was waiting on all four when I decided it's time to take a shit. Big fuckin mistake. Half way through I realised I fucked up. Vomited all over the floor and on my legs. Worse part is I had to sit there 10 more minutes in that puddle while I finish pooping."
18. Portarossa had a date from hell.
"I've told this story before, but I had invited this guy over to my place for dinner after we'd been casually seeing each other for three weeks or so. Things were going pretty well -- we were chatting, getting along like a house on fire, and he was helping me cook dinner -- when I started to feel extremely intestinally unwell. I've always been kind of a private pooper, and I could tell that this one wasn't going to be fun, so I asked him if he'd pop down to the shop at the end of the road to grab a bottle of wine for dinner. He agreed, and toddled off down the street, and as soon as he was gone I raced to the bathroom and relieved myself with something roughly akin to the force of a... well, imagine this, but in reverse. I took a minute to catch my breath, reached over to the toilet roll holder, and came back empty.
Well, shit."
"No matter. I had a full 9-pack of toilet paper in the back room -- I didn't have space to keep it in my tiny bathroom; it was a very small apartment, so I usually just grabbed a roll or two -- and he'd only just gone. I had plenty of time. Cut to me, thirty seconds later, pants around my ankles and my shit-caked bunghole shimmying my way down the central hallway of my flat when I hear a still, small voice from behind me.
'Erm...whatareyoudoing?'"
"Turns out he'd managed to get to the shop and back in record time, and was sitting on my couch in my living room with a perfect, perfect view of my little faecal burlesque. I was framed in the doorway like a goddamn Renaissance painting. It was as though I was presenting myself to him in the worst possible You like? come-on in the history of dating.
It's very difficult to have a civilised dinner after that."
19. younopeme saw smoke and knew there was trouble.
"I was troubleshooting a breaker at work. Fucked up and didn't charge the closing springs before starting up the associated generator. This generator starts at about half of normal operating voltage. When the smoke started rolling out of the switchboard because the charging motor was burning up, I knew I fucked up."